


Christingle

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-18
Updated: 2007-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1630043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"It's not just an orange with some things stuck in it," Will said.</em> </p><p>Not quite a Christmas story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christingle

**Author's Note:**

> Written for leah k

_To make a Christingle, a common children's Christmas decoration, you will need:_

-an orange;

Two things became clear that day: firstly, no matter how unseasonably warm the summer had been, oranges grown in the English climate would have to be moved inside the house; and secondly, you couldn't, as a prospective undergraduate, apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year.

"So don't," Mary said, busily attacking dead leaves with garden shears. "Ouch, that stings! Was I always this inherently clumsy or is it a recent development?" Her daemon fluttered and chuckled around her head. "That's rhetorical, don't answer that. Could you find me a plaster? And try not to laugh? Thank you."

Will smiled, a little wanly, and rummaged in the kitchen drawers to find the plaster. Mary wiped the drops of blood off her finger and held it up to be dressed. "There," he said, quietly, careful about it, pulling the adhesive strips away one by one. She looked up at him, suddenly, with something new in her expression. He couldn't hold her gaze; turning automatically to the window, he watched the rain, gentle but ceaseless and building up into puddles on the North Parade.

"Oh, Will," she said, and dropped the shears. Swinging herself up to sit on the counter, she gave him another one of those looks: long, searching, looking for evidence. Kirjava's fur was damp from the condensation on the window, and Will stroked her head and said nothing.

"Sweetheart, listen." Mary put a hand on his shoulder and didn't force him to look at her. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to. You can apply to Cambridge. You can apply to Imperial, they're good for your subject. I'm sure you'll get in anywhere you want to go."

"Oranges in wintertime," Will said, deliberately light. "It'll be nice."

Mary smiled, and shrugged, and let it go. "It'll be lovely. Incongruous, but lovely. Do you think your mum would like a cutting?"

"I don't think you can grow oranges from cuttings," Will said seriously, and she grinned at him.

"You're a philosopher, Will. That brain of yours needs good training."

He nodded. "Oxford," he told the rain after a while; he could see her movements as dim flickers in the glass, blurred by the drops heading downwards. "It has to be Oxford. If they..."

"They will." Mary waved to her reflection, her eyes visible through the distortion. "Oxford, then. Be a love and put the kettle on?"

Will went into the kitchen and did it. Kirjava was purring, quietly, into his ear.

*

_-dolly mixtures (or other soft sweets);_

Mary sent him care packages from home, full of sweets, clean underwear and love. His mother sent handwritten notes and single pressed flowers from her garden. Oranges from the tree arrived in early October, and Will ate them on the way across the quad, juice and seeds and all, the early-morning hoar frost crunching beneath his boots. The night before, he'd dreamed that the orange seeds took root in his stomach, clinging to his insides with tiny green tendrils, and grew long stems and lush foliage, flowering into his mouth.

The letters came by post from the house on the North Parade, sometimes, and sometimes from the lab through pigeon post. Will found them disconcerting in the brevity of the address, that a letter sent to _William Parry, Trinity College_ , could arrive, unannounced, into his hands on a winter morning. "You used to be invisible," Kirjava told him. "You've been found, that's all."

It made sense to Will. In the chill of the evening, he turned on the lights in his staircase kitchen, preheated the oven, wedged the door open with a large book and waited for the scent of sugar and cream to drift into the corridor. Kirjava chased her tail lazily on the floor and scampered lightly out of the way when the first person stopped in the doorway and said, shyly, "That smells good."

"Fairy-cakes," Will said. "Would you like some?"

"Yes," she said, and stepped inside, slowly, hesitantly, with her eyes on the ground. Her hair was mouse-brown and she hid her face behind it, but her daemon was a tricoloured macaw, raucous and gorgeous.

"I have oranges, too," he said, and she looked up and smiled.

The recipe was Will's mother's, delicate and fluffy batter decorated with Mary's dolly mixtures, and while they placed a sweet carefully on the exact centre of each cake, Will learnt that the macaw's girl was called Lily and she was from the north, that she wasn't comfortable around new people but she wanted to make friends, that she liked apples and atlases and philosophy, and didn't like cheese.

While they put the cakes in the oven, Kirjava scurried across to meet a rabbit daemon, peering into the room. "You can come in," Will called, and the human followed. "I smelled baking," he said, timid but bright-eyed.

There were more people when the cakes came out of the oven, and more when they came to eat them, the orange peel filling the air with a sharp, citrus tang. The low light made small things sparkle, the sugar crystals spilled from the spoon, the gleam of metal cutlery, reflected over and over in all their eyes. They all liked sweet things, they had their starting-point, and Will was able to sit back, watch daemons scrap and tangle, their people bickering over philosophy and love and life and Queer As Folk, and let it all wash warmly, deliciously over him.

Later, when he came to clean up, wiping flour off surfaces and brushing it out of his hair, Kirjava asked, "What was this, really?"

"Finding other people," Will told her.

*

_-a red ribbon;_

"Do you have a girlfriend?"

"Um." Will's eyes were tightly shut, and there was something scratchy by his face. Carpet, he thought sleepily. Rolling over, he looked straight up into the light. It was eclipsed by a passing shadow. A person, Will thought, and then it started coming into focus, the floor, the party, the lemon-sweet taste in his mouth. The girl sitting on the chair above him, her hair tied up in a flamboyant knot, the strands gleaming softly in the yellow electric light. "Um," he said again. "Sort of."

"Boyfriend?" she asked, and Kirjava hissed something quick in his ear. He missed whatever it was and sat up, lifting her firmly down onto his knee.

"Er. No. A girlfriend." Will was surprised he was being so coherent; the room was even settling into a certain stillness, and he could make people out now, drinking quietly in the corners, draped in attitudes of recumbency over and around each other. It was comfortable here, he thought, suddenly, as suddenly as he could through the mellow haze; comfortable, and soft-edged, and he was happy to stay here with the citrus in his mouth and the girl sitting above him with her hair up. Her daemon was a bird with large wings, enormous pinion-feathers and soft down beneath. Will had a strange, urgent desire to run his fingertips through that softness, resisting only because it would be a huge effort to move.

"A girlfriend. Is she at Oxford?"

What the hell, Will thought, and yes, that was another thought with soft, soft edges. "Yes, she is."

"Which college?" She was persistent, quick.

"One of the little religious ones," Will said, amazed at the words flowing effortlessly out of his mouth. "One of the ones no one's heard of."

"What's she like? What's her name?"

Will closed his eyes and thought about that. "She's very clever. She's not afraid of anything. She's a very good liar. She's not much like me. I don't see her..." - a pause, while his thoughts grew flint-edges, then softened again - "very much. Her name is Lyra."

"Pretty name." His new friend touched his head, briefly. "Well, if you should get lonely without her..." She pulled her hair down in a smooth movement, liberating the long fabric ribbon that had been wound artfully through it. Pulling a pen from her pocket, she scribbled on it and pressed it on him, her hand unexpectedly warm in his. "If you should get lonely. Well, you know."

She smiled at him, suddenly shy, and then she got up, her hair hiding her face, leaving Will to sink back down into the carpet and close his eyes. When he opened them, the world was spinning again. Concentrating hard, he tied the ribbon around Kirjava's neck, over her protests - "Will, I am not your personal organiser" - and sank down into a pleasant, golden-edged slumber.

He dreamed of wings, birds and angels, a wildcat dancing across rooftops, he dreamed of Oxford: but it was his own.

*

_-(doubt);_

Nine o'clock. Will squirmed in his chair, sitting still when Kirjava nipped, gently, at his ear. The room was grey and unusually translucent in the morning light, the sun blurred white at the horizon. It was early - in the morning, in the year.

"Milk, Will?" Dr. Frost paused at the window and picked up the kettle, pouring it out into his tiny china teapot.

"Yes, thank you," Will said, slowly, and the sentence hung awkwardly on the last word. Like every tutor, Dr. Frost wanted first-name terms - but the problem, Will reflected, was that he didn't suit his first name; no one really could suit it.

"Here."

Will took it, warming his hands on it. Kirjava reached out with a single paw, purring at the warmth spreading through her fur. "Thank you."

"Now, Will." Dr. Frost sat in the armchair opposite, fingers steepled. "I expect you're wondering why I called you here."

"Yes, sir."

The tutor frowned at that, his face shadowed against the translucency spilling below the window. "Gabriel, please, Will. This is no archaic place of learning."

Will's eyes lingered on the worn, overstuffed chairs in the study, the shelves lined with books, the honey-coloured stones in the eaves, and said nothing.

"In that spirit, " Dr. Frost continued, "I'll go on. I want to make sure all my students are well and happy. It's important to me. More so than your progress in philosophy - although that, too, is naturally very important to me." A flash of icy mirth. "And I worry, occasionally, about what I see of you."

"Why, sir?" Will asked, and it was let pass, because it was Will's invisible voice, the one that lifted from the memory like sheets of clear plastic..

"Your attention wanders. To be frank, I often feel that you are distant, in some place other than my tutorials. You do not make" - his voice faltered at the mundanity of it all - "eye contact."

Dr. Frost's daemon was a tortoise. Eyes bright, alert, she sat solemnly on the arm of his chair. Will stared at her, thinking quickly, conscious of Kirjava's weight on his shoulders. "I have," - Will stopped, thinking, thinking - "certain issues." A pause. "They're being dealt with."

"What, you see others' souls?" Kirjava whispered, sharp, precise. "You're _dealing_ with that?"

"Well, I'm glad," the tutor decisively. "I'm glad you're... being helped."

"Yes," Will said. The tea was beginning to cool.

"Well, then, I won't keep you." He was still decisive, getting to his feet. "Just know that you can come to me at any time."

"Thank you, sir." Will stood up and Kirjava trotted out behind him, her claws making no mark on the carpet. "Really, thank you."

"He can't know the truth of it," Kirjava said, as the door closed behind them. "He means well."

"Yes, well," Will murmured, "but he is a philosopher. There are more things on earth than he can dream of."

Kirjava snuffled, her version of laughter, as they went down the staircase and paused to sit beneath the trellis, evergreen in the winter. Across the quad, on the path through the gardens, he watched a girl in a red hat with an eagle daemon above her, another girl with a following beagle, a boy with a bobcat bouncing at his heels.

"It ought to be a burden," Will said. He stood up, stretched out, went on. "But it isn't."

Kirjava chased a bird across the grass, up a tree, along a branch, down onto Will's shoulder. He laughed, for no reason at all in the middle of the quad, and the two of them walked on.

*

_-(faith);_

November, the dying days. Oxford terms are short and hard, Mary had warned, and he understood that, understood the tiredness in the shadows of his bones beneath his skin, but there were charms, too, to this accelerated mental life, to Christmas before Advent. "Welcome, all," said the chaplain in measured, southern American tones, laden with incongruous images of prairies and summer, here in this cold place beneath these echoing rafters. "Welcome each and every one of you to Trinity's Christmas carol service."

 _Even me_ , Will thought.

"To worship the Lord our God," said the chaplain, voice carrying over the assembled rows of people, the public with their hats and folded hands, the undergraduates with their rumpled denim and candle flames reflecting over and over in their eyes. Above them, the chapel bells were ringing, slowly, sonorously.

 _Even me_ , Will thought again, fingers clinging to Kirjava's fur, warm and safe in the chill. _I who brought about Authority's end._

"For _thine_ is the glory," whispered Kirjava, her insolence all her own. "Thine is this kingdom. Thine is the world around you now."

Will bowed his head, and around him the sconces burned down, bright and glorious against the winter night. And then the choir were getting to their feet in an orgy of feet-shuffling, disturbing the chapel dust, standing in rows before the congregation, and the world was taking a deep breath alongside them.

 _Personnent hodie, voces pueralae_ \- and their voices rose, filled the space above like buds flowering. Something of himself was up there in the roof, Will thought dizzily, floating above the city into the starlit sky, something human and unearthly and carried up along with the voices and the sound of the bells, ringing Christmas out across the dreaming skyline.

*

_-and a candle._

The power went out mid-afternoon. By then there was already a dimness to the edges of things, a blurring of text and fine detail, but at first they didn't notice. It was only after twenty minutes, when Will's laptop whined and switched itself petulantly off, that he padded downstairs and found Mary flicking the kitchen light-switch on and off. "It's gone," she said, uselessly.

"My battery just died," said Will, and led her resolutely away from the switch. "Mary, stop that. Do we have any candles? We should find them before the daylight goes."

The sky blackened quickly. By the time the first stars were visible on the skyline, Will had placed candles on every surface. Their light flickered, but the overal effect was comforting, Will thought. Large, irregular shadows crept across the floor, and Kirjava was trying to hide herself in them and failing; her eyes stood out, mirror-like, in the dimness, and she had bounded back into Will's arms when the kitchen door opened.

"It's lethal out there," Mary reported, taking off her scarf and coat and hanging them off the back of a chair. "The streetlights have gone too. Anyway, next-door-but-one have a clockwork radio and they say the power should probably be back in the morning. We just need to sit tight till then."

"That's fine then," Will said easily, and Kirjava bounced up, batting playfully at Mary's chough daemon, who squawked and fluttered upwards. "Mary, what's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing," Mary said, sitting down finally and pushing her hair out of her eyes. "It's just I had this evening all planned. It's cold outside, it's cosy in here, I was going to cook you a nice dinner and ask you all about your first term."

"We still can do that," Will offered.

"Electric oven," she said mournfully.

"Even so." Will picked up a candle and went across to the fridge. "We can sit by candlelight and eat oranges, and all the ice-cream before it melts, and I'll tell you all about Michaelmas."

She laughed at that, and Kirjava gave her fingers an affectionate lick. Standing up, she reached for a fresh candle and took another orange out of the fridge. "My, we do have a lot of these left, don't we?" she said, somewhat ruefully, and threw it for him to catch. "In some ways this is appropriate, you know. It's the shortest day, it's supposed to be dark." She was looking thoughtful, and pushed the candle into the orange seemingly without thinking about it. "A Christingle," she said, grinning. "Remember, from school?"

Will nodded. "You need a ribbon around it," he said, with a sudden clear picture in his head of what it was supposed to look like. "And some dolly mixtures, or raisins or something, and oh, cocktail sticks to put them on."

He was digging things out of drawers as he spoke, handing them to Mary one by one. She, too, had the light of memory in her eyes, and it was strange, the clarity of the vision. The story telling itself, Will thought.

"All very symbolic," Mary said, and it sounded to Will as though she was tired. "The sweets, the four seasons, the ribbon, Christ's blood, the candle flame, the light of the world. I used to know about these things."

"It's not just an orange with some things stuck in it," Will said. "It's more than the sum of its parts."

"That's what I used to believe." Mary nodded.

"No, it's still true." Will held it up and saw himself cast in the glass by the light of the candle, reflected eyes burning bright. "You made it, so it's more than just things. You made it, so it's touched with Dust. That will still be true in a thousand years, if it lasts that long."

Mary took it from him. "You're brighter than you look, Will Parry." She ate one of the sweets and grinned at him. "Maybe the same is true for Christmas. It's a story, so we keep on telling it, and the whole world stays bright with Dust."

"Maybe." He was smiling to himself, reaching out for Kirjava by instinct. "We create it, don't we? We make it exist where we are."

"Our own little world among the millions." Mary looked happier, all of a sudden. "Our own little Oxford, which is, I do believe, one of the nicer ones. So tell me, now we have ice-cream and oranges: how was your first term?"

Beyond the reflections in the window, the night stretched out, bleak, into the distance and the clouded sky. Will thought about that, the two of them, their candle flames, their daemons, lighting up their world, and said: "Let me tell you the story."

 


End file.
